It would be desirous to mark textiles and textile products for a number of reasons, including supply chain tracking, failure/liability analysis, and reduction of transshipments/grey market diversion/counterfeiting. Such marking should be easy to apply to the textile and easy to read, yet not damage or change the character of the textile nor be easy to reproduce (to avoid copying and counterfeiting).
NANOBARCODES™ particles (Nanoplex Technologies, Inc., Mountain View, Calif.) are encodeable, machine-readable, durable, nanoparticulate identification tags. These particles are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Appln. Publn. No. US 2002/0104762 A1. The particles are manufactured in a semi-automated, highly scalable process by electroplating inert metals (such as gold, nickel, platinum, or silver) into templates that define the particle diameter, and then releasing the resulting striped nano-rods from the templates. These templates can be obtained commercially and subsequently modified, or they can be designed from scratch using lithographic processes developed by the semiconductor industry.
Just as conventional barcode is read by measuring the differential contrast between adjacent black and white lines using an optical scanner, individual NANOBARCODES particles are read by measuring the differential reflectivity between adjacent metal stripes within a single particle using a conventional optical microscope. NANOBAR™ software (Nanoplex Technologies, Inc.) then identifies which particles are present in a fraction of a second.